Category: German

That strange face in the mirror: Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig

The stamps on the envelope were still moist. I noticed they were foreign. As I got to the window I realized that I was, in fact, in another country, somewhere unfamiliar. I didn’t know where. To confirm or dispel my sense of foreboding, I went into the bathroom. A stranger’s face looked at me from the mirror.

An uncertain, shifting sense of identity haunts Maybe This Time, a collection of nine short stories by Alois Hotschnig originally published in German in 2006,and in Tess Lewis’s English translation in 2011. Eerie and unsettling, his tales often begin and end in a strange, not-quite-alternate reality where it can be difficult to tell if the oddness lies with his characters or narrators, their surroundings, or both. Sometimes things seem a little more grounded, but the angle of observation is unusual, unexpected. At other times, an obsessive anxiety builds until all sense of logic and meaning is distorted. And rarely is the situation explained or resolved. The publisher’s description suggests comparisons to Bernhard (well, they are both Austrian) and Kafka (the standard comparison for themes of alienation), but one might well describe their otherwordliness, mood wise, as akin to classic The Twilight Zone epsiodes. Or perhaps, simply consider it “Hotschnigesque.” (Interestingly, his more recent and more much sophisticated novel My Mother’s Silver Fox, inspired by a true story, still leans into a strong atmosphere of ambiguity and troubling questions of identity.)

The narrators and protagonists of Hotschnig’s stories tend to find themselves in strange situations, drawn into circumstances that defy rational explanation, trapped in distorted dreams, and waking in places they do not recognize. Perhaps even more unnerving, they frequently allow themselves to fall into a cycle that they recognize as destructive. The opening story, “The Same Silence, the Same Noise,” is the account of a man who becomes obsessed with the neighbours of a property he has rented. He observes the couple sitting out on their jetty, day after day, rain or shine, seemingly oblivious to all around them. He keeps trying to convince himself that their indifference means nothing to him, but he simply cannot let it go. Their daily routine, if oddly consistent, may not be as uncanny as the narrator makes it out to be, it is difficult to tell where he is losing perspective. That is, of course, what makes the story so strangely engaging:

My attitude clearly had to change. But I didn’t know how to get away from these two. I simply didn’t exist for them, and that is how they hooked me. They refused contact, yet they willingly exposed themselves to me. I had caught the scent of their lives, which obviously had reached some premature end. I had fed on them, devoured them, and now I wanted more. I couldn’t resist absorbing their most fleeting emotions as my own, and so I carried them inside me and lived out their disquiet, which was also my disquiet.

Later on, in the story from which the title of the collection is derived, “Maybe This Time, Maybe Now,” another narrator seems to be aware that the odd obsession that has cast a spell on his family makes no sense, but again no one is willing to face reality even if the circumstances are, on the surface, far less mysterious. Or are they? Here, an entire family regularly gathers for holidays and special occasions, but one member never joins them. No one knows why he doesn’t show up, he’s not far away and they do sometimes see his wife and family, but he has been conspicuous in his absence for so many years that every gathering becomes solely focused on talking about Walter. Within the subtle absurdity of the situation, is something uncomfortably familiar to anyone with an extended family. . .

Still other stories push the creepiness factor way up. One particularly disturbing example is “Then a Door Swings Open and Swings Shut” wherein a man is lured into an old woman’s home when he is on his way to visit her neighbours. When he enters her house she greets him as if she has long awaited him, and he finds himself in a room filled with dolls of all conditions and ages. Her children. She then introduces him to a special doll, one with his name that he notices bears a striking resemblance to him. She tells him that she had always promised Karl the doll, that he—that is, the other Karl—would come back.

He’s not a bad kid, she said. Peculiar, yes, but you already knew that and, let’s face it, you’re all he’s got. And he’s been waiting ever since you abandoned him. That’s when he came to me. He can’t talk to you about it, at least not yet. But things will work out now you’ve finally come back. And now I’ll leave the two of you alone, she said, and stood up and left the room.

Needless to say, things are about to get really weird for our confused, but oddly enthralled protagonist.

And so it goes. Each of the stories in this slender volume opens a new, unexpected doorway into the life and mind of its characters (one of which is an insect), offering an entertaining little journey into the dream-like world of Alois Hotschnig.

Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by Peirene Press.

In it for the money : My Prizes—An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard

In recent weeks, talk, at least in the literary circles I circle, has turned to literary prizes and prize winners, more explicitly to the question of the use of AI to at worst generate complete stories or at best, toss ideas around in the creation of said stories. So, wanting a fresh, pre-artificial intelligence take on the matter of awards honouring writers and artists, I naturally thought of Thomas Bernhard and his short volume My Prizes: An Accounting. An acerbic take on the whole enterprise of prize giving seemed in order. And Bernhard delivers in spades.

With the characteristic venom of any one of his characters, less the intensity of his typical rant-filled nested narratives, Bernhard makes it clear what he thinks of literary prizes in general and more specifically a number that he has been awarded over the years. In each instance, were not for the cash that accompanies the honours, its likely he would decline the prizes. But like most writers, debts pile up and there is always a need for money!

In each chapter, Berhard recalls the circumstances surrounding one of the many prizes he received during the 1960s and 70s. In the first, on the occasion of the awarding of the Grillparzer Prize of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, he is faced with the need to acquire something more formal to wear to the ceremony than the grey wool trousers and bright red pullover combination he was inclined to wear absolutely everywhere and, naturally, he leaves the task of purchasing a suit to 9:45am, a mere one hour and fifteen minutes before the event is due to start. In his haste he chooses an outfit that, following lunch with friends and family following the ceremony, he realizes is uncomfortably tight. So he exchanges it for a larger size, a circumstance he can’t help but recognize as absurd.

Winning the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 affords him plenty of opportunity to rail against Austria, an obsessive pastime of many of his fictional protagonists, when it turns out that he is to be awarded the so-called Small State Prize, typically given to young writers in their twenties, rather than the so-called Large State Prize acknowledging a so-called life’s work. (That classic Bernhard qualifier “so-called” is applied generously through this short collection.) Already in his late thirties, the fact that he is merely getting the award normally reserved for youth embarrasses and annoys him and he takes great pains to correct his impressed friends who think “Austrian State Prize” sounds very impressive indeed.

And so what is the Small State Prize? they asked and I replied that the Small State Prize is a so-called Nurturing of Talent and so many people have already won it you can no longer count them, and now I’m one of them, I said, for I’ve been given the Small State Prize as a punishment. Punishment for what? they asked and I couldn’t give them an answer. The Small State Prize, I said is a dirty trick if you’re over thirty and as I’m almost forty it’s a huge dirty trick. But I said I’d sworn to come to terms with this huge dirty trick and I had no thought of declining this huge dirty trick. I’m not willing to give up twenty-five thousand schillings, I said, I’m greedy for money, I have no character, I’m a bastard too. People didn’t give up, they drilled down. They knew exactly where to drill to drive me crazy.

He spends much time defending his feeling of dishonour with the award and his country, and then goes on to channel it all into what turns out to be a rather disastrous acceptance speech. Great fun.

We are also treated to Bernhard’s hilarious accounts of a few of the impulsive purchases he makes with his prize money over the years. He buys a red Triumph Herald in one case, failing to even consider whether the vehicle is a sound investment. In another instance he describes his hasty commitment to a decrepit house—the walls of his own he has longed for. His poor aunt who accompanies him on the viewing tries to talk him out of a rash decision. He signs the paperwork anyhow but then has to wonder whether he has the fortitude to see the house transformed into a liveable domicile.

The perfect antidote to the seemingly endless arts and entertainment award season, this  little volume offers a personal reflection that is at once cynical, funny, and when you least expect it, sentimental. Sometimes Bernhard is almost pleased, even honoured with the acknowledgements he receives. But he rarely lets that colour the speeches he is forced to give in response, many of which are gathered at the end of the book. He tends to the short, if not so sweet, when he gets on stage—after all, a brisk award ceremony is always a welcome one.

My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard is translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway and published by Knopf, as a stand-alone text and together with his memoirs Gathering Evidence.

“I don’t know, Heinz, are you the one or aren’t you?” My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig

The past is so long ago. A lot is certain and clear—there are documents. But I was only a few years old at the time, so it’s difficult: I only know what I experienced physically. That I do know. But the paths, the detours we followed, even the ones I was there for, those I have to imagine.

Heinz Fritz grows up haunted by a past filled with mystery, secrets, ghosts. He is the son of a Norwegian woman who fell in love with a wounded Austrian soldier she was caring for during the Nazi occupation of Norway. When she discovered she was pregnant, she was forced to leave. As the daughter of the mayor of the northern town of Kirkenes, her circumstances made it impossible for her to stay. It seems that her soldier accompanied her to Oslo, and from there she travelled alone to his hometown of Hohenems, where she was to live with his family. But somehow the plan goes awry. Something happened in Berlin, something which remains unexplained, and although she reaches her destination, soon after Heinz is born in late 1942, she falls ill and he is taken away from her. He ends up fostered out to a farmer and his wife near Lustenau until his mother suddenly arrives to claim him four years later. Mother and son then live together, happily if precariously, for several years until she meets and marries a man named Fritz with whom she will have two more children. But Heinz’s stepfather is cruel and his mother emotionally fragile,  prone to frequent epileptic fits, leaving him uncertain where he belongs, if anywhere. It doesn’t help that his mother regularly questions whether he really is her Heinz, or whether he’d somehow been mixed up with another as an infant.

An unsettling and inspiring meditation on memory, identity, and the power of love and resilience, My Mother’s Silver Fox, by Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig, is the story of one man’s attempt to untangle the truth of his own history as he looks back over almost eighty years of life. Heinz  longs to understand his origins, but he has surprisingly little to go on at first. Whenever he asks his mother about her past or his real father, she inevitably falls into a seizure, so he stops asking. The bits and pieces of information he manages to gather over time, whether close to home or when he finally visits Norway with his mother, contradict one another. The only seemingly solid documentation he possesses is an itinerary charting his mother’s journey from Oslo to Hohenems, apparently under the auspices of the Lebensborn, the secret SS initiative designed to promote racial purity and build an Aryan race.

If marrying Fritz is his mother’s attempt to find stability, eight year-old Heinz finds that settling down offers him no sense of security. His stepfather seems most intent on teaching him to slaughter animals, so he copes by what he describes as relocating internally. He discovers that it is possible to hide inside his own imagination. His earliest realization that such a possibility exists comes when his mother reads to him from her cherished copy of Peer Gynt. Although the text is in Norwegian, he understands it because each time she reads it she becomes Peer Gynt’s mother, dramatically performing her death for him. It is a performance she repeats as his mother too, so often in fact that he finds it hard to tell when she is acting and when she is actually having a seizure. Each time she is there, but not there:

No one knew where her journey took her. But I wanted to get away from there too, ideally with her, and so I tried to go on the journey the same way she did and practiced falling down and falling over. I portrayed what went on before my eyes, I re-enacted it, actually, as I re-enacted everything that scared me in order to get hold of it. No matter how often I witnessed them, her episodes shocked me every time. And they attracted me. Everything that frightened me also attracted me and in the way that my mother enacted Åse’s ascension to heaven, I tried to accompany her on her journeys. I wanted to understand and I wanted to feel the strength she had in those moments when she was unconscious.

So, Heinz learns from his mother that he can find refuge in acting; by performing he can be protected from that which threatens and frightens him, through private fantasies and later on a makeshift stage in his backyard. But, soon he becomes hungry for more inspiration than the tattered magazines his family subscribes to and when a friend lends him a copy of his first proper book—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—he is completely consumed by the main character, terrified and obsessed. “I almost didn’t survive my first book,” he tells us, “but I let it happen because without this book I certainly would not have survived, I sensed that, too.” From that point on, he cannot help but surrender to the heroes of books he reads or films he sees, and eventually, every role he takes on in the theatre as a professional actor.

But the road to the theatre is a long one. Heinz’s childhood and adolescent years are difficult. By the age of fifteen, after only seven years of schooling, he is working full-time in an embroidery factory to help support his family. His stepfather is dying, his mother is often hospitalized, and he has two younger siblings. As close as he is to his mother, she remains a mystery, one that deepens as her illness progresses. When he does find out who his real father is and where to find him, he is not welcomed, or even acknowledged. In his absence, he longs for a true father figure of some kind, someone lasting, but instead he finds a series of men who pass through his life, each making some important contribution. They can’t, however, fill in the missing past. When, at the age of sixty, Heinz finally does meet his real father, there are some answers, but are they even true?

There is a haunting, almost diaphanous quality to this circuitous first person narrative, so thoughtfully translated by Tess Lewis who has also translated two of Hotschnig’s earlier works. The tone is cautious, the style halting, with italics used generously for emphasis and to indicate uncertainty. It is as if Heinz is sorting his story out as he tries to tell it. He is an actor, after all, so he is inclined to perform his life, as he once staged recitals in his childhood backyard, relying as much on his imagination as on the scattered facts he knows, or thinks he knows, for sure. Ultimately, the unfilled and conflicting elements of his account reflect so many of the secrets that persisted in the wake of WWII, and even more powerfully so because Heinz Fritz’s life echoes (with permission, Hotschnig notes) the real life story of Austrian actor Heinz Fitz. The final result is mesmerizing.

My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by Seagull Books.

A jay in the grass is a turning point in history: In a Cabin, in the Woods by Michael Krüger

There must be a crack in the fabric of the house,
the candle flickers as if it can’t decide,
and the piece of paper on which I’d been
scribbling all day long, trying to find a beginning,
lies on the floor, butter-side down.
But the doors and windows are all tightly closed.
A beginning of what?

—from poem #13

When we look back now at those eerie early months of the pandemic, when we all retreated, each to his own quarters, surfacing only with masks and the niceties of prescribed social distancing, it all seems so far behind us. Afterall, even if the virus is still circulating, any hope that humanity would emerge from isolation united has been proven to be extremely naive. But for many creative professionals—artists, musicians, writers—that period offered an unexpected opportunity to turn inward and focus on their art in a newfound, if temporary, silence.

For German writer and poet Michael Krüger, quarantine was especially critical. He had just begun treatment for leukaemia when Covid-19 hit, and was also suffering from shingles, so his immune system was very fragile. He and his wife took refuge in their house in a rural area near the Starnberger See southwest of Munich where he was under strict orders not to leave the garden (advice he tried to abide by). Inspired by the scene unfolding outside his window as spring fitfully made its way towards summer, and by brief excursions out into the immediate surroundings, he crafted a cycle of fifty poetic meditations on nature, existence, aging, and writing. He sent twenty of these poems to the Süddeutsche Zeitung where they were published weekly in 2020, before the complete sequence was released in a single volume, Im Wald, im Holzhaus, in 2021, at a time when the pandemic was still an ever present concern. Now this sequence is available in Karen Leeder’s generous English translation as In a Cabin, in the Woods.

As Krüger closely watches and records the seasonal transformations around him, the activities of birds and other small creatures, he cannot ignore the news that filters in from the outside world, nor can he express his reaction to it all without reference to the writers and composers whose words and music have long been his companions. The tone is contemplative, but not without humour:

The cuckoo is back, the long-haul flier, still a little tired
from its nighttime journey over Spain, France, the Alps,
but I heard it this morning, after the news, as I stood
before the mirror asking myself whether it was still
.       worth shaving;
as I greeted Cioran, Canetti and Blumenberg, all of whom
have asked this same question after the news, and the world
has nevertheless squeezed out another spring each year,
even if there’s always something missing that cannot
.      be replaced,
maybugs, for instance, that were only put in the world
to serve as supper for the cuckoo.

—from poem #10

The poems that comprise this sequence, with their detailed observations of the natural world, tend, in a sense, towards the Romantic. Among the many poets who are summoned along the way, it is Hölderlin who appears most frequently. Krüger even notes with regret that “Corona” has foiled plans for celebrations of the great poet’s anniversary. But then illness, his own and the virus sweeping the globe, has altered so much, suspending so many assumed certainties. The familiar rhythm of the seasons is a comfort, an assurance of continuity, but one that can only go so far. Krüger, tugging at the edges of his enforced confinement and weighed down by all the books of human history he’s consumed, ventures out beyond the garden to connect with life again, only to find himself wanting to retreat once more:

Two dogs approach me, then they stop and growl.
Dogs smell fear, my grandfather had drummed into me,
so I drive them away, shouting loudly, and return proudly
to the community of the fearful, loners and eccentrics,
who are loathe to negotiate with the strong. When the great crisis
becomes a permanent state, the third world war will have
broken out, without us noticing. The pigeons stagger about
like orthodox snobs in grey tailcoats, and two woodpeckers
cross the meadow like men of the world, as if tall grass were
a ludicrous whim of nature. I want to go back to my story
about a man who, with a melancholy gesture, gives up everything
he is and has, in order to be the most confident among all
the disappointed prophets. The sparrows seem like a barrel
.      of laughs.

—from poem #33 (62)

Yet, even though his specific medical circumstances arise on occasion, as do broader concerns about philosophical and political disruptions, past and present, the overall mood of this sequence is idyllic. The timeless beauty of the natural world is measured against the very real, if only half understood, reality upending the other commercial and political world that suddenly seems so present in the news, but still so far away. As he tells us, “I am one of those who came into the world old. / For me, nature should always be beautiful and terrible, / and a jay in the grass is a turning point in history” (#24). Reading these poems now, only half a dozen years after they were written, makes one almost nostalgic for the thoughtful melancholy of those early months when the everything seemed to grow quieter and the sound of airplanes passing overhead was replaced by birdsong. It is disheartening to see the way our societies and nations have become, in the intervening years, not more united and compassionate, but more divided and, in many places, hostile.

In a Cabin, in the Woods by Michael Krüger is translated from the German by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books.

People look so human: Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer

Just exactly where can we draw the line between human and animal, man and beast, and exactly how fuzzy (or furry?) is that line? How has our understanding of movement across that line changed over time? And what about those beings, those creatures that have been understood, or imagined to stand somewhere in between? These are the kinds of questions that Austrian writer and visual artist, Teresa Präauer, entertains in her charming, yet focused philosophical and cultural essay, Becoming Animal. The terrain she explores is one populated by a host of liminal creatures—hybrids, monsters, and chimeras— the sort of beings that have continued to inspire both our scientific and artistic imaginations from Antiquity through to the present.

Präauer begins with the harpy, one of the most distinctive figures to appear time and again in early efforts to catalogue all known living beings—factual, mythological, and “exotic” alike—that occupied artists and thinkers from the Medieval era on into the Age of Discovery.

In the Historia naturalis animalism, a seventeenth-century treatise on natural history by John Johnston, there is a bird-like creature with a human head. This ‘Harpyie’ or ‘Harpyia’ has a sceptical, not unfriendly face and long, flowing locks that are gently tucked behind one ear and extend halfway down her body—a bird’s body, of course—the plumage growing thicker and darker towards the back. Compact like a small chicken, the harpy sits atop a pair of enormous talons that could just as easily support a bird of prey.

It’s not her first appearance in natural histories, she has been depicted and evolving for a century. From our scientifically “sophisticated” vantage point today though, such a creature and many of her companions depicted in such volumes seem fanciful, but were they any more so than the angels and demons that also figured in many hierarchical systems? And early Modern scholars often had to work from accounts and drawings made by those with direct experience of the animals in question, as well as reports from travellers often carried second or third hand over time or distance, as they strived to catalogue and categorize all forms of life—mineral, vegetable, animal, and magical. Many of these life forms sat on the edge of classifiably, “pretty monsters” like the harpy and, as time went on and naturalists became more rigorous in their efforts, the fanciful creatures began to be weeded out, but others, like humans with hirsutism, found themselves defined as distinct from their hairless brethren, but like all humans, still very different from other primates. Yet, now, with the ability to study DNA, we know we share 99% of our genes with chimps and bonobos and suddenly the need to once again draw a clear boundary between ourselves and animals has become more important—and more difficult to maintain.

A relatively brief work, only 96 pages long, Becoming Animal is not a chronological survey of the development of taxonomical conventions—although Linnaeus makes more than one appearance—but rather a varied account that moves back and forth, from Michelangelo to contemporary literary theorists, from prehistoric cave paintings to “furries.” It is an engaging flow of ideas that pulls in scientific elements along with literary sources such as Ovid, Kafka, Nabokov, and Inger Christensen to explore the many facets of our connection with and within the natural world. It is the kind of entertaining exercise that can’t quite be pinned down, but Präauer’s primary interest ultimately lies in the space between human and animal, a space that can be approached from either direction. It is a space of movement. She notes that French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, when speaking of “becoming-animal,” perceived it as one of many forms of being, as a “demand for a mode of writing that moves within transitions and liminalities,” however:

Becoming is a verb, a doing that does not mean being. I write ‘becoming animal’ as two separate words, not joined by a hyphen. Animal is noun, and becoming is a verb. When I am becoming animal, I am not an animal. I am in transition. An animal that is becoming human is also in such a transition, albeit in a different way.

This thoughtful essay ends, as it opened, with the author observing the myriad forms of life visible from her window, leaving her reader with much to contemplate about this world in which we are just one element of a much larger whole.

Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer is translated from the German by Kári Driscoll and published by Seagull Books.

I’m often out of step with the times: An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea

As if tugged by an invisible thread, I stroll the same old streets—under linden and chestnut trees, past potholes where water or fallen autumn leaves used to gather and kids used to splash and stomp around—breathing more deeply as I walk by the walls enclosing certain yards. Behind one I detect an elderberry bush, or maybe it’s jasmine, or even the more fragrant Japanese honeysuckle. I know there must be rusty garage door in the near courtyard, which will echo the sound of my heels and wake up the neighbour’s dog. And the small starlings lining the now-obsolete rooftop TV antennae will promptly chime in, too, right on cue.

After many years in Zurich, Victoria, the protagonist of Swiss-Romanian writer Dana Grigorcea’s novel An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, has returned to her native Bucharest, a city now transformed from the Communist-era world in which she grew up into a place reshaped by post-revolutionary currents. It is a place she experienced in flux, as a member of the “so-called transitional generation,” but it has changed even more in her absence. She doesn’t tell us exactly why she has come back, but she is living in her family’s apartment and working at a bank. That is, until the bank is robbed by an old man with whom she will again cross paths as his geriatric crime spree continues. This unlikely occurrence not only knocks her off-kilter, but when her employer insists  she take leave to “process the trauma,” it opens up time and space for her to reconnect with the people and places of her past.

And so, in the stifling summer heat, trailed by the sticky scent of linden blossoms, Victoria fills her newly freed days wandering the city. Bucharest becomes a kind of post traumatic memory theatre with a personal grid superimposed on its layered historical structure. Street names are critical to her ability to orient herself, especially on those arteries that have been renamed, sometimes a number of times, as political currents have shifted. She regularly encounters people from her childhood and adolescence—school friends, former boyfriends, characters from her neighbourhood. Not exactly stream of consciousness, Victoria’s line of thought takes regular digressions as she sees or thinks of something or someone she once knew. Her new boyfriend Flavian will frequently try to navigate this altered landscape with her, offering a frame of reference wherever he can to the many changes that have occurred during her many years in Zurich. And her parents, who have also been living abroad, arrive to visit, further disturbing the unsettled dust of memory. She has an awkward lunch with her mother:

She picks up her knife and fork and continues eating, and I wonder if it would be better for us to talk about her life in the south of France but we tied that last time and it only made her sad. ‘We moved there too late, just too late.’ Or should I tell her about what’s going on here in Bucharest—about her dental practice which is going well? But she already knows. Once again, I refrain from asking her where she parked the car whose keys she’s  left with me, and what it looks like. I’d bet it’s a cream-coloured Peugeot, upholstered in cream-coloured leather. Some day I’ll come across it by accident while strolling about the neighbourhood. The door will pop right open for me, just like in Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales of eternal youth and everlasting life, stories where the hero returns to his homeland after a long absence and finds that everything has changed, he doesn’t recognize a thing, and even starts to doubt whether he ever had any homeland at all.

As she traverses the city, Victoria notes the heavily weighted history of buildings, landmarks, public squares, and roadways. Her senses are on high alert, yet she is distracted by the smallest details, like the colour of nail polish she has chosen. And there is a constant, uneasy misfit between past and present that unnerves the narrative flow. Sometimes Victoria repeats herself, other times she falls into a side story about someone from her past that may or may not be fleshed out later, or seems to lose track of the thread of events that are—or appear to be—happening in the present. Sometimes the line between truth and illusion breaks down altogether like when a ride on the bus on the same route she used to take every day with her grandmother becomes a surreal, dystopian detour through a decaying urban landscape where cellphone service suddenly disappears and other passengers seem to morph into people Victoria thinks she recognizes.

Of course, she is a less than reliable narrator; her interpretation of reality and her emotional engagement is uncertain. Past lovers continually reappear, leading Flavian to ask “Are you waiting for a lover?” He eyes her with suspicion. “If so, I’ll stay by the door to catch him.” But through it all, Victoria remains an infectiously engaging story teller drawing on a wide range of characters and experiences. From the tale of a philandering neighbour murdered by his wife, to memories of her wildly eccentric grandmother, to details of unconventional tendencies of her parents and their friends, to an account of joining a crowd of thousands to catch a glimpse of Michael Jackson during his Dangerous tour in 1992, the Bucharest that she brings to life is the Ceausescu-era city she grew up in overlayed by a changed, modern metropolis that doesn’t exactly match at the seams. In these cracks she encounters people from her past, both in memory and  in real time. But then, what is real time when life has been disrupted by an unexpected event in a city that has itself been disrupted by more than one political upheaval?

An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea is translated from the German by Alta L. Price and published by Seagull Books.

2025 Wrap Up: Reading and other stuff

 

I don’t know what I expected when this year began. Ever since 2020 it seems we have greeted each year with some measure of optimism—I mean how could it be worse than the one that just passed? And somehow, each year has managed to be worse in some new, unanticipated way. 2025 saw the continuation of conflict, famine, destruction, climate catastrophes.  We also witnessed the further escalation of intolerance, racism, sexism, anti-trans sentiment, religious fundamentalism, and autocratic politics. Where I am in western Canada we have witnessed all of this, not just from our neighbours to the south, or distant nations, but right here close to home. It is hard not to lose hope, but giving up is not an option and so, 2026, here we come, preparing for the worst but dreaming of the best.

Personally, I struggled a bit this year. Family stuff, some depression, and, in late November, a car accident that has left me with stiffness and pain that is slow to subside. But, on the bright(er) side, my focus and concentration has returned, and replacing my damaged car proved easier than it might have been. My old Honda Fit had more value than I expected, and I happened to see a (newer) used vehicle that fit my needs for a very good price and was fortunately in the position to buy it. If the police manage to find the impaired driver who hit me (assuming she was insured) I will even get my deductible back. But, quite honestly, I’ll be happy to be able to look over my left shoulder again!

As for reading/reviewing, 2025 was a mixed year. I had a few off times when I struggled to finish books (or gave up altogether), and a number of mediocre reads passed without public mention. At the same time, I read some excellent poetry in English, but could not find the words to write coherent reviews. For some reason, I feel I lack the knowledge and vocabulary to say the “right” thing about poetry in my own language—I feel more comfortable responding to translations. And I did read a lot of poetry in translation this year.

Looking back over 2025, the singular defining force for me was the work of Danish experimental poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009). In January I read her essay collection  The Condition of Secrecy, and I was immediately entranced by her love of language and her view of the world as informed by science, nature, music, and mathematics. I knew I wanted to read all of her poetry and fiction and, throughout the year, that is exactly what I did. I read eight of her translated works and only have one left to obtain although I have a dual language edition of one of the sequences in that volume (“Butterfly Valley”). Along the way I also decided I wanted to learn to read Danish as there are elements of her work that simply cannot be reproduced in translation (mathematical constraints in particular).

And so, I am learning Danish, or, should I say, jeg lærer dansk.

Although I enjoyed all of her books, my favourite piece of fiction was the crazy word play mystery Azorno (1967) and my favourite work of poetry was her monumental it/det (1969), both earlier works. Of course, the wonderful book length poem alphabet (1981) is also amazing. Her poetry and essays are translated by Susanna Nied, her fiction by Denise Newman.

Some thoughts about a few of my other favourite reads from the past year:

 Prose:

Ceilings – Zuzana Brabcová (translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická)

Set on the detox ward of a psychiatric hospital in Prague, Brabcová captures the institutional environment and the strangeness of psychotic interludes with the skill only personal experience can provide. This wild and delirious ride pulled me out of a reading slump.

Dreaming of Dead People – Rosalind Belben

I read two novels by Rosalind Belben this year, The Limit which was re-issued by NYRB Classics several years ago and this one which was re-issued by And Other Stories this year. Both are strange in a brutal yet beautiful way, but Dreaming is, to me, a more accomplished, in depth novel.

Love Letter in Cuneiform – Tomáš Zmeškal (translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker)

One of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years and when I finally picked it up off the shelf, I was delighted to find out how funny and weird this multi-generational family drama truly is. Zmeškal lends magical realism and historical reality with a cast of eccentric characters to create a memorable tale.

Self-Portrait in the Studio – Giorgio  Agamben (translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell)

Far from a conventional memoir, Agamben invites his reader on a tour of the various studios he has occupied over the years, reflecting on the people, books, and places that come to mind along the way. A surprisingly engaging work.

The Dissenters – Youssef Rakha

The final two novels on my list are both highly inventive in style and form. Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English manages to seamlessly incorporate Arabic expressions without explanation, adding to the richness of this original, multi-dimensional story of one remarkable woman set against the events of recent Egyptian history. Endlessly rewarding.

Nevermore – Cécile Wajsbrot (translated from the French by Tess Lewis)

This ambitious novel is a moving evocation of loss and change. A translator has come to Dresden to work on a translation of the central “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from English into French. Reflections on change and transformation drawn from her own state in life and various historical events accompany the process of translation.

Poetry:

Of Desire and Decarceration – Charline Lambert (translated from the French by John Taylor)

It is most unusual for a poet as young as Lambert (b. 1989) to see her first four volumes of poetry published together so early in her career, but translator John Taylor felt that the Belgian poet’s books show a natural growth best appreciated as a whole. He is not wrong (he is also a translator whose judgement I always trust).

Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005–2022 – Durs Grünbein (translated from the German by Karen Leeder)

This selection of poetry rightfully won the Griffin Prize this past year. Grünbein’s work tends to draw on his hometown of Dresden and Italy where he now spends much time, and this selection presents a good introduction to the variety of his mid-career work. One can only hope that the attention he has received with this book will lead to full translations of more of his work.

arabic, between love and war – Norah Alkharrashi and Yasmine Haj (eds)

The first of a new translation series by Toronto-based trace press, this selection of original poems with their translations—most written in Arabic, with some written in English and translated into Arabic, exists as a kind of conversation between poets from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora. Vital work.

The Minotaur’s Daughter – Eva Luka (translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith)

This book, a complete surprise tucked into a package from Seagull Books, is a delight. Luka’s world is a strange and quirky one, transgressive and fantastic. Leonora Carrington is a huge influence, with a number of  ekphrastic poems inspired by her paintings but given life from Luka’s own unique angle. Loved it!

Ancient Algorithms – Katrine Øgaard Jensen (with Ursula Andkjær Olsen and others)

This is the book that marked my return to reading post-accident. And how could it not. Jensen’s translations of Olsen’s poetic trilogy are very close to my heart. This unique work begins with poems selected from those books (in the original Danish), followed by Jensen’s translations, which set the stage for a series of collaborative mistranslations guided by rules set by the various poet translators involved. A wonderful celebration of poetry and translation and the necessary bond between the two.

My Heresies – Alina Stefanescu

Finally, one of the English language poetry collections I read and did not review (I did have a great title though). Alina Stefanescu breathes poetry as a matter of course, as is clear to anyone who has had an opportunity to engage with her online. There is an infectious defiance to this collection which straddles Romania and America, conjures angels and demons, and explores the everyday reality of romantic and parental love. I connected most directly with wry observations of motherhood that resonated with my own less than conventional parental existence.

There are, as ever, many other books I read this year that could have made this year end review. You’ll have to check my blog to find them!

Happy new year!

Counting, accounting and recounting: The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm

two!
one two  –
one two  –  three!
.        two
one two three  –   four
.       two

“a recounting,” the first number poem you encounter in Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock, opens with a lengthy note explaining exactly how the piece should be recited—volume and intensity directed and measured—before erupting across the following five pages as numbers, spelled out, descend, rise, and repeat. Finding the flow and riding it (guided with a few more directives along the way) is not difficult, especially if you allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.

And there are ninety-nine more, each one involving numerical elements in some shape or fashion. Some are sequential, others visual, still others are in verse form. Clever or funny or profound, it is amazing just how far numbers can take you.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Rühm, who recently celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, is an author, composer and visual artist. His poems reflect all of these interests. He was an early practitioner of concrete poetry and an original member of the influential Wiener Gruppe. His interest in numbers as “the most pared-down and at the same time most universal element of design” goes back to the early 1950s. When he composed his first number poems in 1954 he was unaware of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ own explorations in this area, but he has continued to incorporate numerals and digits into his spoken and visual poetry, expanding the possibilities numbers offer. The Folded Clock, newly released from Twisted Spoon Press in Alexander Booth’s translation, gathers one hundred of these poems in a handsome volume.

Many of Rühm’s poems play with the rhythm and sound of numbers in various sequences and patterns. Others exploit visual qualities and double meanings that arise from the titles and the images or words they are paired with. And a sly humour surfaces throughout, as in “imperfect counting poem”:

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
toes

one’s missing

Or “sixty-nine pairs of lovers” which depicts, inverted on their side, six rows of ten and one row of nine (sixty-nine) 69’s.

But, Rühm is also inclined to employ numbers and words to make thought provoking statements about the world. “time poem”—another piece that begins with a note on recitation—takes on cosmic dimensions starting with:

1 january, 12:am: bang!
2
3
4

And so on, counting down one calendar year, day by day, marking the significant events, from the Big Bang to the first moon landing. Given that fish don’t begin to swim in water until December 19, the final day of the year opens up, first by hours, then half hours, and by 11:30 pm, minutes, until the final minute opens up into seconds to allow human history from the first cave paintings to space exploration to fall int place. (You can read this poem online here.) Elsewhere he allows climate change, odd historical facts, and interesting news stories inspire poetic creations. Ruminations on living also fit well with the measurement of one’s personal relationship to time as in “sense of time”:

a week ago i was still a child
five days ago i  was an adult
four days ago was the time of the “vienna group”
three days ago i was living in berlin
for two days now i’ve been in cologne
everything since the turn of the millennium happened yesterday
since early this morning i haven’t aged at all

The variety of poems in this collection is wide and endlessly entertaining. They range in length from just a few numerals, to pieces that extend for several pages, to sketches and collages. Even if you fear you might be intimidated by avant-garde or experimental poetry (or poetry at all), this is a work that is not only intelligent and entertaining, but that contains many pieces that you could easily find yourself unable to resist reciting aloud.

The Folded Clock: 100 number poems by Gerhard Rühm is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Twisted Spoon Press. (Excerpt and images can be seen at the publisher’s website.)

War is back again: War Primer by Alexander Kluge

When I was a pupil, we learnt to read and write with a primer. When war breaks out, Bertolt Brecht said, we have to learn to read and write again.

These words, which come from the acknowledgement at the close of Alexander Kluge’s War Primer, reference both the primer as a short introductory book on a subject or informative piece of writing, and Brecht’s famous War Primer, a series of short poems written in response to images the poet collected while exiled from Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Kluge’s own experience of the war, especially the allied bombing of his hometown of Halberstadt when he was thirteen,  has had a significant influence on his long career as a writer, philosopher, and filmmaker. And again it appears here in this slender volume, but the instigation for this work is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—the return of full scale war to Europe. However, his multi-faceted look at  our stubborn propensity for conflict across the western world, is both wide and immediate, and conveyed via brief historical accounts, anecdotes, short stories, and imagined conversations, interspersed with images and film clips.

The book opens with a personal series of reflections. He thinks of his mother, born in 1908, considers how little he and his fellow students understood of the dangers mounting in late 1944, and recalls the last few months of the war and the burning of his hometown on April 8, 1945 (a subject to which he has devoted an entire book). As a boy whose sense of war was much coloured by the exploits of his tin soldiers on imaginary grounds, he could only have a thirteen year-old’s understanding of what the troops he was observing on those final days meant. From today’s perspective—in the case of this volume, his ninety-first birthday in February of 2023—his knowledge is much deeper, broader, and no less troubled.

Although some of the textual and visual material directly references the current conflict in Ukraine, the overall effect here is to create a mosaic of contextual commentary and musings about the nature of war, the military mindset, and the inevitable, often deadly, dance of diplomacy. Kluge’s short pieces approach moments or aspects of the First and Second World Wars, the US Civil War, the invasion of Iraq, and more. He examines the idea and illusions of armour from different angles, zeroes in on specific battles, and dramatizes often hapless discussions about the dynamics of power and peace. This is not a detailed exegesis, it is rather a collection of vignettes. Kluge’s characteristic approach to fiction that holds close to the borders of nonfiction, allows him to incorporate voices from the past in first person or dialogue. Yet, there are no solutions. As we continue to see, war is endlessly reinventing itself, and its small moments of hope always cling to a thread:

TWO SIDES TO A HAPPY ENDING

In the early days of the Ukrainian war, there was a report of a certain number of villagers, including young people and children, holding up a Russian tank. After a period of hesitation, the tank driver put it in reverse and rolled back out of the village.

This is an urban legend. It was already making the rounds during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. During the 1991 coup in Moscow, the scene actually occurred several times and led to several tank divisions withdrawing from the city. In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, however, the same kind of confrontation ended in a massacre.

The report in the case of Ukraine emphasized the bravery of the civilians who opposed the tank. But it takes two to tango, as it were, for an encounter to end happily: the determination of the residents, but also that of the young tank driver, perhaps all of 18, who put the tank in reverse.

The images that illustrate this book come primarily from Kluge’s original film montages, along with a few documentary photographs. QR codes link out to cinematic material of varying lengths, typically triptychs of these same images shifting against musical scores, but other material as well. Most are very short and worth viewing. Taken together, text, image, and sound make this very much is a primer for the twenty-first century. One that, sadly, seems to be still be a necessary resource.

War Primer by Alexander Kluge is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

In that strange, that golden light: Psyche Running – Selected Poems, 2005–2022 by Durs Grünbein

And suddenly you saw it, far below
the coast road, after the twelfth curve,
stomach surging from the hair-pin drive.
En route for the south; so we sped on
perched above the drop, windows down.
Sorrento with its villas, its fan palms,
had been swallowed by the plug-hole
of the mirror in a great green swirl.
It hung in the haze, a hulk of bare rock.

The sea dead still. Not a trace of myth,
but for the yachts decked out in chrome
glinting in the sunlight. On a white hull
we made out ‘Nausicaa’ in faded letters.

Infectious energy, shifting, rising and falling. Durs Grünbein is a poet who writes as if regularly navigating the kind of winding roadway described here in “Island without Sirens” from his 2013 collection Colossus in the Mist. This poem, dedicated to Alexander Kluge, which begins with the promise of finding a site with rumoured Homeric association and ends with the view of an island not unlike a mass of barren lunar rock rising out of the water, is a clear reflection of what has made him one of the most important and successful contemporary German poets. Now his most recent release in English translation, Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022, has just been shortlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize (his second such honour for this prestigious award).

Born in Dresden in 1962, Grünbein moved to Berlin in his twenties to study theatre. Since the fall of the Wall, he has travelled widely and presently he lives in both Berlin and Rome. He has published more than 30 books of poetry, along with translations of classical and contemporary authors, essays, libretti, lectures, and collaborations with artists, composers and filmmakers. His prolific writings cover such a wide scope of literary form and history that he has, as translator Karen Leeder notes in her valuable Introduction, called himself an “unpoet.” Nonetheless, poetry remains central to his work, having won him widespread recognition and a number of major awards. The present collection offers an ample illustration of the breadth and appeal of his poetic vision.

The selections in Psyche Running represent nearly two decades of Grünbein’s output, drawn from ten volumes published beginning in his early forties through to the age sixty. As such, they trace the poet’s growth in mid-life and mid-career, his changes in tone, themes and exploration of form. This collection opens with work drawn from two books published in 2005. Both feature poetry inspired by history, though in very different contexts. Portraits of personalities and scenes from the ancient world figure in The Misanthrope on Capri while his focus turns closer to home with Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City. The latter is a cycle of forty-nine numbered poems, a lament for Dresden, destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. Yet, even in an elegy, Grünbein’s playful tendencies surface—something that was not necessarily received well by some readers:

Not a rowdy wedding-do. It was The Night of Broken Glass
or, what sharp-tongued folk called: the glazier’s lucky day.
And Ash Wednesday just a hop, skip and jump away.
Fools and Nazis—huzzah!—sure, they had a blast.
What’s that? Innocent? Disgrace came long ago.
Dresden shepherdesses, German bands, where are you now?

–  from “4”/ Porcelain

Twenty-four of the short poems from this sequence are included in this collection, but the complete work, with photographs and one additional poem, has been published as a separate volume, also translated by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books. My own review can be found here.

2007’s Verses for the Day After Tomorrow marks a turn to a more personal focus, exploring  themes of memory and human experience, then, after Grünbein began to spend more and more time in Italy, another shift occurs. With Aroma: A Roman Sketchbook (2010) and Colossus in the Mist (2013) classical elements appear, as do poems that draw direct inspiration from Rome and its environs. In a number of the pieces selected from these two works he demonstrates a wonderful sensitivity to the natural world, as in “Island without Sirens,” quoted above, and this magical evocation of a murmuration of starlings moving through the evening skies above Rome in “Aroma XLIX (Starling Swarms)”

How one envied them their nose dives, swooping down on
.      gravel lanes,
or taking in Rome from a bird’s-eye view, conqueror style.
In fact, they only wanted a little urban updraft to be transformed
into currents and reflections, as their aureoles appeared
.     before
the rosé of the cloud-shading, in a sky painted by Turner.
It was a dance of veils, a stunt performed by thousands of
.      points in synch:
something like the sound of bells, visible in silhouette above
.      the domes.

The influence of  thinkers, ideas, and science on Grünbein’s poetic instincts takes centre stage in the next section, the first published translations from 2014’s Cyrano; or, Returning from the Moon. Each piece in this cycle of eighty-four poems, inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac, “takes its cue from a moon crater” Leeder tells us, “and pays homage to a thinker or philosopher known for their study of the moon.” The poems presented here were selected by the author and I, for one, would love to be able to read this inventive work in full. The mood changes once again with the next selection, the long poem “The Doctrine of Photography” from The Zoo Years: A Kaleidoscope (2015). Presented alongside postcards of prewar Dresden from Grünbein’s personal collection, this piece imagines into being scenes from daily life in the community as darker times close in:

Another spring. Imperial gardens on display:
for six months the magic of flowers
serves to ease the effects of the new
constraints, the new laws.
A hymn to existence, a scared hymn
to the beauty of nature around us,
the newspapers swoon in the
grandiose style of the times.
More powerful than any Olympiad,
closer to a feminine aesthetic sense,
like Hitler’s hands, eunuch-white.

A strong selection of poems have been chosen to represent the final two volumes collected in Psyche Running. Sparkplugs (2017) and Equidistance (published in 2022, marking the poet’s sixtieth birthday) build on imagery, sometimes dreamlike, drawn from science, nature, and everyday life to explore more introspective or existential themes that reflect an increasing awareness of aging and remembrance:

Do I know how many summers we have?
Whether we will recognize them as they were,
these  outdoor scenes, where we
slipped quietly past each other like angelfish
in that strange, that golden light?

I only know the day that keeps what
will happen next hidden behind glass.
Things grow more distant, swim up close,
in the film light. And the projector is me.

–  from “The Projector” / Sparkplugs

Altogether, this generous sampling of Grünbein’s poetic work over the better part of the last twenty years, fills in a long overlooked gap—Porcelain notwithstanding—in the availability of his poetry for an English language audience going back to Michael Hofman’s  2005 translation of a selection of poems from his first four collections, Ashes for Breakfast. Karen Leeder, who in addition to Porcelain also translated Grunbein’s Oxford lectures, For the Dying Calves (Seagull, 2022), has come to know the poet well over the years and has a deep affinity for his wry, vibrant spirit. Her informative Introduction and detailed notes provide an overview of the collection, her approach to this translation, and added detail, as required. Although he frequently draws on historical, philosophical, literary, and scientific sources, there is, in Grünbein’s perceptive, witty, and engaging verse, an irresistible quality that naturally invites a closer read. This volume, then, is not only an important addition to his available writing in English translation, but a wide ranging and vital introduction for anyone new to his work.

Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022 by Durs Grünbein is translated from the German by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books.